With only three songs recorded and released, a lot of people are telling me that it’s too soon for me to put my money on Lykke Li as Sweden’s next sensation. To those people I say, read this couplet from her single “Little Bit”:

It’s for you I keep my legs apart,
I forget about my tainted heart.

Any girl that’s capable of writing something so dirtay, and yet so coy and tender, has my vote and love. Add to the mix that she’s Swedish, and I’m smitten.

Lykke Li has already generated a fair amount of buzz in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia. Now 21 years young, she spent her childhood summers growing up in the mountains of Portugal, and winters traveling with her mother through India, owning only one album – a cassette of Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. She eventually got her hands on a few more albums and in September of this year, with the release of her first EP (“Little Bit”), Lykke’s quickly gotten “a buzz bigger than insects in Texas.” After playing a few shows with Peter, Bjorn and John, over the past few months, Björn Yttling decided to executive produce her full length debut, to be released in early 2008. The album will also feature work from fellow Scandinavians Röyksopp and Kleerup (as much as I like Kanye reference, I also love a chance to use a good umlaut – look out for these in future posts as well).

So for those of you who aren’t just sold on the fact that she’s hot and Swedish, there’s also something to be said for her music. In the same way that fellow Swede, Jens Lekman, makes the act of self-administering an asthma inhaler soft and romantic (You pick up your asthma inhaler and put it against your lips / Oh those lips I’ve loved / They’re so red and soft/ I’m so sorry I couldn’t love you enough) Lykke’s song writing achieves the same end, by inviting the listener into her world, and taking them through what feels like a very natural and intimate thought process.

“Little Bit” is a song about how hard she finds it to tell the guy she’s seeing that she loves him; partially because she doesn’t know if she does, and partially because she’s scared he won’t say it back to her. She starts out the song boldly saying “Hands down, I’m too proud for love” – unfortunately, I hear that one every time I try to close a deal at Alfie’s. But by the end of the song, it seems very natural when she says “I will do it, push the button, pull the trigger, climb a mountain, jump off a cliff ’cause you’re my baby / I love you love you a little bit.” All that emotion (or as R. Kelly would call it “real talk”) set to an infectious beat, makes this song a must have. The video is pretty cool too, directed by Mattias Montero.